Presentation and pitching skills

About this course

Welcome to Course 4 of Module 2, the second of three carefully curated modules within the scope of the Challenger project. All courses are designed and developed by professionals from prestigious VET providers.

You will work in a team during this module on a given challenge. Your tutor/role model, experienced mentors, and industry experts will support you throughout the phase.

Module 2 will build up on Module 1. By the end of this module, you will have acquired valuable insights and skills and be prepared to bring your own innovative journey to life in the subsequent Module 3.

• Module 1:          Learning the basics
• Module 2:          Applied Phase 1: Working on hands-on projects for business
• Module 3:          Applied Phase 2: Creating your own innovations

All these courses are offered for free. If you registered for participation and handed in the group assignments to your tutor/role model, you will receive a confirmation of participation in the form of a digital badge. After completion of all courses of the module, you will receive an innovation certificate that will prove your experience and gained know-how.

The courses are aimed at learners in VET schools, bachelor students in universities, persons interested in developing their entrepreneurial mindset, persons interested in innovation and how to put ideas into practice, teachers/educators, industry experts, and community members.

How do I present and pitch my idea in the best way?

Here, you will find the 101 on pitching your idea in the best way possible. This skill is necessary to find everything from investors to coaches to customers.

Your innovation’s survival depends on finding stakeholders willing to invest their time, energy and money in your innovation. Therefore, you need to get drilled in pitching your innovation in the best way possible!

First, it is important to remember that being a good presenter is not necessarily a talent you need to be born with; it is something you can train—and need to train.

A common mistake is using the same pitch, no matter who you speak to. You will notice that the amount of background knowledge, time and interest will differ greatly between different occasions you talk about your innovation. With some people, it may be beneficial to use industry terms to show that you are well-read on the subject, while with others, this will have the reverse effect, and you will lose their interest. We will now give you a few examples of common mistakes and what you should do instead.

• Not adjusting the language to the receiver. As mentioned, you must train your ability to word your pitch differently, depending on who you are talking to. Some of these meetings will be prepared beforehand, and then you will have the time to adjust your presentation, but other times, maybe at the dinner table with your friend’s parent who is active in the industry, the pitch will be unprepared. These occasions, which are not pre-planned, are just as important as the prepared meetings. You have many people in your contact net that you may not think of, which could significantly impact your innovation’s development and future.
  
  
• Writing a full script instead of bullet points. It may feel safe to script your whole presentation word by word, but doing so is not wrong; it is what you do with the script later that matters. Listening to someone looking down at a paper the whole time is neither interesting nor radiates confidence in your innovation. Therefore, put your script into bullet points instead and rehearse them well. Select which USPs (unique selling points) you want to push extra for on different occasions, and ensure these are mentioned during your pitch. See your bullet points as a backup if you lose track in your presentation, and the more you know by memory – the better.
  
  
• “Our innovation is perfect!” Of course, we all dream of developing something without errors, flaws or shortcomings. Well, this is simply just not realistic. And be clear on this while pitching! Doing so will increase the chances of you earning your audience’s trust. If you can meet the criticism that you see coming in the questions section (because, of course, you should offer your audience to ask you their questions!) before you even get there, your innovation will seem well worked, and you will appear to have thought this well through.

• Too much happening at once. When preparing your presentation, think ‘less is more’. Having PowerPoint slides behind you filled with text while your audience is listening to you and looking at your prototype will probably make your audience confused after leaving rather than enlightened. Make your PowerPoint an extension of what you say verbally, and use your words wisely. Once again – use bullet points instead of a full script. If you are showing your prototype, make space for questions and your audience to take a good look at it instead of bombarding them with information simultaneously.

• Not being prepared. This applies to a lot of things, but preparations are key! Before pitching your idea, ensure you have double-checked your technology, prepared answers to questions that likely will come, and know what you want to communicate and how you want to communicate it. Except for giving a strong impression to your audience, you will also gain confidence, which brings us to the next piece of advice…

• Not being aware of your body language. What we communicate includes so much more than just our words. You can record yourself presenting to avoid communicating things that you do not want to through your body language. In this way, you will notice things that you do that you may not be aware of, such as keeping your arms crossed instead of giving an open impression, clicking your pen, touching your hair and so on. By being aware of your body language, you can stop these habits and ensure that your pitch’s focus is your innovation, not yours.

• Not knowing your audience’s motivation and needs. When pitching your idea to different audiences, the key aspect to start from should be their motivation. In some cases, it is finding inspired and motivated youths that has ambition, in other cases it is to find a solution to a critical problem. In some, it may be just to make money. Try to find out beforehand which roles they have, for example, what may motivate them a bit extra to continue working with you. When you have practised your pitch enough times, you may even be able to begin your pitches by asking what your audience hopes your meeting will result in and then take it from there. This requires adaptability, and you are sure you can twist your pitch without losing important elements. If you are not aware of your audience’s motivation and needs, you may lose them along the way with your pitch by pushing the wrong things and, in that way, missing what they could benefit from your innovation.

Another important technique in presenting in a good way is knowing the art of storytelling. This may sound both difficult and diffuse, but it does not actually have to be that hard. The YouTube channel “TED” that produces the famous “Ted Talks” has published a video called “The Secret to Successfully Pitching an Idea”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0hVIH3EnlQ . Mar Hershenson (investor and teacher) gives several really good tips, but what we are going to focus on is the part about storytelling (starts at 2:08). This is how she recommends that you organize your storytelling in your pitch, divided into three sections – just as if it was a story, where your innovation is the hero:

1. The hero’s world – what is the current situation?
2. The big confrontation – problems with other products or “heroes”
3. The resolution – your hero comes in and saves the day!

Let us put this into an example, where we play with the idea that we are the inventors of a new electrical toothbrush and toothpaste, and we are pitching this to investors at an oral hygiene company:

“A good oral hygiene has been stated to be of importance for our overall health. A lot of people have problems with their oral hygiene, even if they are brushing their teeth twice a day.

There are a lot of products on the market that state to help with this issue – mouthwash, dental floss, tongue scrapes and toothbrushes and toothpaste that claim to save your oral hygiene. But should having good oral hygiene really take up your whole bathroom cabinet as well as a lot of our precious time? Making this process unnecessarily time consuming and complicated, many people skip steps and are left with a lack of well-functioning oral health. This can lead to diseases and inflammations, not only in the mouth- and tooth area, but also the rest of our bodies.

We do not believe that this should be the case! With our new electrical toothbrush and toothpaste, you will not need all these products anymore. By taking the active ingredients and capabilities from other tools and products, we have combined all these products into one! Your customers will be left with more space in their cabinets and less time by the sink – at the same time as their oral hygiene will be better than ever!”

This is an example of how you can include storytelling in your pitch. This makes your pitch more interesting as well as clearer on what issues your innovation is fixing.
After creating your storytelling part of your pitch, it would be beneficial to take a step back and try to look at your pitch with critical eyes. Let us use our previous example again – the audience in this case is an oral hygiene company, what is their motivation? Well, they want to earn money and make sure that investing in your idea would give them financial profit.

Realistically they will question what this will do to their other products’ relevance. Make sure that you have prepared answers for this! In this case, maybe this innovation would be aimed towards a certain target audience, let us say parents with toddlers and a full-time job with a limited amount of time on their hands. The technology that has been used may be quite expensive and therefore rule out the customers that do not have a large budget for their oral hygiene. These are just examples but think this through thoroughly – as we have stated before, being prepared is key. If you find it hard to look objectively at your own work, ask someone else to look and help you find the question marks. This could be a role model, a mentor, another teacher, or an expert.

You may have heard about elevator pitches before. It is an expression for pitches that are as short as what an elevator ride would be. In this way, you would be able to pitch your idea in a setting where there is very limited time and no equipment available. Having an elevator pitch prepared is helpful both for these situations, but also for determining what the absolute most important things are about you and your innovation. This information may be useful for settings where the time is not as limited as well since you can then sort out information that may not be relevant at the pitching stage. Pitching is about trying to wake an interest, and as Mar Hershenson said: “Make people feel like they are missing out on something”. Some details may then be left out of the pitch and left for either the audience to ask questions about or for a later meeting.

Course materials

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL / LINKS

https://careerdevelopment.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf1041/files/media/elevator_pitch.pdf “What is an elevator pitch and how do I prepare one?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0hVIH3EnlQ “The Secret to Successfully Pitching an Idea”:
 https://careerdevelopment.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf1041/files/media/elevator_pitch.pdf   What is an elevator pitch and how do I prepare one?

Assignment

This assignment needs to be completed as a team effort. Your tutor or role model will guide you through the assignment. Please reach out if you require support. The final assignment should be submitted to your designated mentor.

Once your course is complete, your tutor or role model will confirm your completion and instruct you to upload the results to the platform to receive permission to obtain a badge. Upon completing all six courses within a phase, you will receive an innovation certificate for that respective phase.

Do elevator pitches for each other in small groups! 

Use your actual story or create a fictional one for the pitch, taking the skills you have gained in the course into consideration. Decide together before starting who the audience consists of—are they well-read on the subject? Are they potential users or only buyers (e.g., managers who are buying equipment for their team)? What is the setting?

By training these skills and acting them out, you will be better prepared for when the time comes. Give constructive criticism to each other, and give at least three pieces of advice, which consist of at least one thing that was done extra well and one thing that could be improved until the next time. Unsure of what an elevator pitch is or how to prepare one? Read this material from Princeton’s Career Development, and you will get a clearer picture:

https://careerdevelopment.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf1041/files/media/elevator_pitch.pdf

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.